Split-Second-ar y Educat ion:NO ONE HAS EVER understeered
their way to driving glory. In addi-
tion to being the enemy of driving
pleasure, understeer, if potent enough, has
the magical ability to reshape the front end
of your car. It’s bad.
Pendulum turns and left-foot braking,
practices common in the world of low-grip
driving, also happen to be understeer’s
greatest foes. This test measures the effec-
tiveness of those techniques. The goal, in
this case, is to destabilize the chassis and
point the drive wheels in the desired direc-
tion, allowing earlier throttle application
and faster exit speed than is achievable
using conventional road-racing techniques.
Or so goes the theory.
Tim O’Neil, winner of five U.S.
and North American rally champi-
onships and founder of the Team
O’Neil Rally School, says there are
multiple benefits of left-foot brak-
ing. High on his list: correcting
understeer, inducing oversteer, and
aiding timing in changing the direc-
tion of a slide. The great philoso-
pher Sammy Hagar might have
immortalized the notion of using
one foot on the brake and one on
the gas, but O’Neil helped perfect it.Despite these benefits, carmakers and
lawmakers alike take a dim view of destabi-
lizing any thing, especially a moving car.
Accordingly, the practical application of
this kind of driving is relegated to low-grip
rally stages, rallycrosses, and other places
less susceptible to the long arm of liability
attorneys. To hammer home that point, we
disabled the stability control, traction con-
trol, and anti-lock brakes on the otherwise
stock Subaru WRX we used for this test.
But how well does it actually work?
We took the WRX, our VBOX, and our left
foot to the gravel, comparing the nuances
of a pendulum turn to a conventionally
executed one. Here’s what we learned:PEDAL DANCE
TESTING LOW-GRIP DRIVING TECHNIQUES, USING WISDOM
FROM A R ALLY CHAMPION AND A ROCK STAR. by Josh Jacquot- CAR AND DRIVER. MAR/2017 photography by A.J. MUELLER, illustration by BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN
RESULTS
—
Left-foot braking
with pendulum turn
Segment time: 6.0 sec
Exit speed: 40.5 mph
Right-foot braking
with conventional turn
Segment time: 6.6 sec
Exit speed: 34.8 mph
UNDERSTEER ASSASSIN
—
Taken from our VBOX data, the different lines in this
illustration represent the actual paths created using
each technique. Despite the Scandinavian flick, the
left-foot-braking run (red) uses less road and is faster.
The conventional line (blue) is slower partly because
understeer causes it to miss the apex.